September 22, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (277)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 147: I’ve been chewing on that idea that “when people don’t show up for you the way that you show up for them, it feels like rejection”. The phrasing is off but I think that’s the gist of it. I’ve been thinking of it since in the context of my right-wing family and the news of late. I’ve showed up for them in a lot of my usual ways but it feels like in a lot of ways, I don’t matter to them. These days, I kind of take their politics personally. That they could see the heartless evil messages out of Fox News and the patronizing bullshot spouted by their kids’ in-laws, and not see how dehumanizing it all is, like that jackass saying that the mentally ill unhoused should be killed, I feel like, but for a ton of really hard work AND luck, I could be that person they’re referring to. And if I didn’t have PiC, if I were on my own and hit a rough patch of illness and unemployment, I’d really be on my own. As usual, I’m the only safety net I have. I could disappear and none of them would even notice.

Now, I don’t actually know if that’s completely accurate. For that part of the family I’m pretty sure it is, but in the bigger scheme of things, I have at least a couple people who would care enough to lend me a hand. If I could bring myself to ask. Not much and not for long, and not to the lengths I have gone for family, but there are a couple. But by and large, the ones who do care are vastly outnumbered by the ones who don’t. That feels not great.

Don’t really know what to do with this thought process but just nod and say that’s the way it is? I guess? I don’t know if the smarter thing is to spend less time and energy caring about other people.

Year 6, Day 148: On the bright side ~woo~ we got our flu and COVID vax! I pre-dosed with cetizirine at 1 pm and sat down for the jabs at 330. 6 hours post, my injection site was sore but well within tolerable bounds. I moved my arm a lot and then committed to a full arms exercise session with weights and elastic bands. I can’t remember what time post-vax I’d normally crash though so I can’t quite tell if this is all fine still or not. I started feeling the full body yuck around 9 hours post-vax. Not terrible, enough to know I don’t feel good.

Now this bit is weird: the tech giving the shot told us we’d have to come back in 8 weeks for a booster. That guidance this applies to both Moderna and Pfizer 2025-26 formulations and is for adults and kids. I haven’t found a single thing to support that statement. The closest thing I found was the AAP recommendation that kids under 18 get two shots 8 weeks apart if they are severely immunocompromised. That’s nothing like what I was told. Weird. I’ve been trying to figure out who we talk to about this to either stem the misinformation or to confirm we really do have to do this dance again in 2 months. Given a choice, I want to be nowhere near the hospital mid-November.

Year 6, Day 149: I’ve been lightly hoarding necessary supplements and prescription meds so that we have a relatively decent volume stored against issues with medications thanks to the tariffs or other Trump fuckery. I just went through and filled my medication daily pill holders and was able to fill five weeks out. Not everything is fully stocked, I’ve got to pick up a few more supplements, but five weeks is a decent chunk of time in which to replenish stores.

It feels like a meditative exercise in some ways. There’s no doubt a bit of this is my hypervigilance coming out to play, but it’s not delusional. We had those formula shortages early into COVID, ADHD meds have been difficult to get for months, another diabetes related med is now artificially understocked. With the tariff nonsense, I can’t imagine that other meds won’t be impacted in some way. There’s no telling when or if my specific necessary meds will be impacted but it will deeply impact my quality of life if they are. I keep thinking of the post-Shift world where currently commonplace meds like ibuprofen become precious.

Year 6, Day 150: Coming out of my second night of waking up in enough pain to wake me from sleep, and also sweating ruthlessly because there’s nothing that pairs as nicely with muscle and bone aches as being drenched in sweat, was moderately miserable. But! This feels like a corner turned on the post-vax yucks because this morning wasn’t nearly as bad as yesterday. Hats off to the cetizirine pretreatment and the ibuprofen for getting me through a semi-rocky two days. I was mentally calling it flu and COVID-proofing until I worried about jinxing us. Because that’s how viruses work, obviously 😆 Then I decided it’s not jinxing because if you childproof stuff it’s reasonably safe but a sufficiently determined toddler could still bypass certain safety measures and it was still (probably) better than not doing it at all. We never childproofed the power outlets when JB was at the peak danger age for that stuff because their danger-seeking was directed in other directions.

Year 6, Day 151: Ah, yes, note to self. The first night after vaccines, SmolAc always has weird unsettled sleep punctuated by bursts of loud sleep-protesting. Wakes me up, every time.

Mosquitoes have invaded the house. 😡Hisssss of being bitten many times while I slept. Evil disease vectors! I can’t find where they might be laying their eggs, we’re usually good about not keeping standing water anywhere, but they could easily have snuck in from outside. On the recommendation of more knowledgeable friends, I’ve treated the drains with bleach in case they’re somehow managing to hole up in there. Cross your fingers they’re not being more sneaky and hiding elsewhere?

September 15, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (276)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 140: New goal: be independently wealthy so that I can help as many people as I can reach and so I can quit my job and go work with animals all day. I was vetting some pet boarding facilities, initial research for one of the two problems I have to solve before I can adopt again, and saw a job listing which made me go YES I WANT TO DO THAT. Sigh. I miss being around and working with animals all day or night. Having an office dog when we have dogs at home is great, but it’s not the same. I don’t know if my body could actually handle that physical commitment anymore but if I was wealthy then I could do it part time! Win win!

Year 6, Day 141: Did I fail down the jetpens rabbithole? Yes I did. Did I doubt I’d want enough stuff to meet the $35 minimum? Yep. Did I find ten things to buy? Also yep. A mix of wants and gifts. I sent all the links to myself to ruminate on for a few days because I’m pretty sure I told myself I wasn’t allowed to buy more pens. But look, so cute! A Uni-ball One P mini gel pen! Panda donut washi! Kitty washi!

This is one of my current forms of meditation, I don’t use it often as it is habit forming, and it works like magic.

Year 6, Day 142: Walking back to the house, I realized I feel human again!? For the first time in weeks. Not good, but physically back to the usual baseline of aches, pains, and tired which is tolerable. What a huge relief.

This means I can tolerate a 5 minute shower again. I can now walk for 10 minutes without being bed bound for 4 hours. I can work and take JB where they need to go without collapsing like my skin only contains a mass of jellyfish! These things don’t seem like much to a normal person but they are everything when they’re gone.

I’m very slowly adding back very low-rep sets of my normal exercises. They’re still pretty low key to begin with and I have missed being able to do them.

Year 6, Day 143: Wow, are my children WHINY. SmolAc has started their transitional kindergarten program at daycare and one exciting (/s) addition to their routine is they now have take-home (optional) homework. It is terrible. SmolAc just spontaneously forgot how to write some of their letters that they’ve been writing just fine for months and so we had to practice it over and over with a letters book where they could trace and then write. I helped guide their hand a few times, then had them retrace and re-write. It was like pulling teeth. They whined and pouted and stomped and tried to quit over and over and over.  Good grief, child, it’s ONE letter. Lots of deep breaths until I couldn’t take it any longer and I sent them to have a snack.

This was published back in July when I was too busy to read the news and now it’s looming on the horizon: “In around 90 days, millions of Americans will learn about out-of-pocket cost hikes of more than 75 percent on average.” Open enrollment is around the corner in October so we’ll see how much of that giant percentage increase is going to impact us. This and losing the charitable deductions for itemizers are the two expected blows to our 2026 operation budget that I know of so far. It feels like I’m always adjusting for yet another hit to our finances, these days.

Year 6, Day 144: Two blows of bad news at once. A friend from blogging and Twitter for well over a decade has been fighting cancer and it’s now terminal. They aren’t that much older than me, and it is heartbreaking to imagine my world without them. This isn’t fair or ok or right. Another loved one is losing their dad to a serious illness, and it’s heartbreaking that this whole section of the family is having to absorb another loss so soon.

Several friends have come down with COVID or the flu, and JB’s been congested all day, so this cold/flu/COVID season is just roaring in. We just got the news that Kaiser will be stocking the COVID vaccine starting the 15th though, so with the Joker at HHS trying to do us out of vaccines with his ACIP meeting later this coming week, PiC and I are strategizing how we can get our vax ASAP without doing it on the same day. We’re grateful that it’ll be available! And we’d really appreciate if we could count on it being available for everyone and for more than 5 business days rather than being subject to the whims of the multitudes of anti-vaxxers.

September 8, 2025

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (275)

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 133: A while ago, I asked Darcy at I Want Guac if she would share what she knows about international banking and currency, and I’m delighted that she obliged. Her post led me to Wanderer’s Norbert’s Gambit which was new to me, and also Wanderer’s banking operational security post which is very relevant to my interests.

I’m still absorbing a lot of this information to see what we can incorporate in our emergency planning (for one of the worst case scenarios: if we have to flee this country), and our day to day online and banking security practices. Those are two very different scenarios. In the former, I have to figure out how we’d survive if we couldn’t get access to our money in US banking institutions because fascism; versus functioning as normal day to day.

The comments put Fidelity on my list for possible international ATM-friendly cards and accounts. I hadn’t thought of them before, but a couple details sounded appealing so I need to do more research to confirm these will be useful to us:

Your Fidelity Cash Management account will automatically be reimbursed for all ATM fees charged by other institutions while using the Fidelity^® Debit Card at any ATM displaying the Visa^®, Plus^®, or Star^® logos. The reimbursement will be credited to the account the same day the ATM fee is debited. Fidelity does not charge foreign transaction fees; however, if you choose to pay a foreign debit card transaction in US dollars, your transaction may be processed at a rate different than market exchange.

Year 6, Day 134: Corporeality was such a mistake.We’re now on Day 11 of this Fucking Flare.

Is it just me or are the Amazon First Reads Historical Fiction selections ALWAYS WW1 and WW2? I’ve been skipping most of their free book selections because there’s only so much WW1/2 set fiction I can take. But I now need to decide if we cancel Prime entirely. We’d been splitting the cost with a few other people for years, and they’re taking that sharing ability away October 1st, so I have to decide if we cut them loose entirely and give up access to Prime Video which has been one of my main (Leverage Redemption!) reasons for continuing the sharing arrangement. We have been using them less and less for shipping reasons. Our primary shipping use case is that sometimes there’s literally no one else who will ship to the reservations and when people need food and babies need diapers, you get that to them any way you can.

Year 6, Day 135: TWO bits of good news today. After 12 days I might finally be turning a corner on the CFS part of my flare. We may be moving into the “is just excruciating fibro pain” part. Yay! I’d sound a little sarcastic there but honestly just being in terrible pain, while not fun, is more manageable than pain and overwhelming fatigue. Fingers crossed.

And one crow friend was alerting on the neighbor’s roof today, and came over to ours for a snack so I ran to oblige. Usually I only put down two treats at a time in case they don’t spot me distributing them. This time I was pretty sure they were waiting so I put out a handful. They were flying solo so they took a few minutes to eat some before stuffing their beak with the rest and flew away. It was fun to watch.

Year 6, Day 136: Labubu dolls: I don’t get it. At least, even though the Beanie baby craze was also irrational, they were cute.

The start of a new school year is a lot. Back to school night. Fundraisers start up. Parent teacher conferences are at the end of the month. The big fundraiser culmination celebration event is this month. Start of the monthly PTA events (which JB wants to attend and PiC often feels obligated to volunteer at). PTA meetings that come with the side of guilt I can’t seem to shake about not doing more than paying for membership, attending meetings virtually and attending some of the community events. I absolutely don’t have time or energy for more. And yet the stupid guilt always bites at me. It’s worse in the first meeting because they’re asking for volunteers for committees. They do put on a lot of events that the kids love and it’s meaningful. But there’s just no wiggle room I can eke out and if I could, this wouldn’t be top of my priority list. Maybe I’ll shake it by the time SmolAc is through elementary school.

Year 6, Day 137: This year is the band year for the local districts. All kids are invited to join the band and learn an instrument this school year. The lessons are free, you have to supply the instrument. The teachers strongly encourage all the kids to try it. It’s a great way to dip a toe into music! I haven’t been able to figure out how to fit in music lessons in JB’s schedule so this is good. This is also Yet Another Thing.

I talked to JB very seriously about how challenging it’ll be at first and once they’re committed, they aren’t allowed to quit just because it’s hard sometimes. The work will pay off. It’ll get easier only with practice. We were able to borrow an instrument from a friend, and had to spend $100 on the other required supplies. Otherwise we would have had to rent one for $30-40/month.

Sadly, their nemesis, a kid I’m heartily sick of, has declared their intentions to join too because they’re going to “master the flute just like their sibling” and good God can we not catch a flipping break from this obnoxious brat? They’re in JB’s class, they’re assigned to JB’s small group in PE, now they’re joining band, they’re constantly picking fights and stirring shit and lying about JB to other kids to turn them against JB. Half my imaginary empire for this kid to move to another state.

I keep reminding myself that JB knows they’re loved. They have dozens of friends their age and trusted adults all over the country. World, even. They have a buddy in the UK who comes to visit them once or twice a year! They have multiple activities and friends at every one. It’s the very rare library visit (PiC takes them almost every weekend) that they don’t run into a friend or three to play with entirely unplanned. A couple jerkface kids, annoying though they are, shouldn’t make or break their school year. They are thoroughly over the kid, I certainly am, but they’re still enjoying life and school and they’re not miserable over school. But I would still give half that empire for that kid, the source of so much annoyance for everyone, to disappear. They’re that classic mean kid who everyone placates in hopes of delaying the target on their backs a little longer. Ugh. Anyway as long as it’s petty stupid shit, we try to focus on all the ways we can make life and school positive in spite of the misery-maker.

PiC asks me if I think the parents of the crappy kids know their kids suck. I say, no, the kids are both themselves and the products of their parents in varying degrees. Unless the parents are garbage, they probably think their kid is the normal one.